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A one-of-a-kind storyteller spins a wry tale set in Stay More, Arkansas, where a wise but eccentric political novice is running for governor, wreaking havoc, and looking, strangely enough, like a winner.

For decades, Donald Harington has delighted readers with ribald, colorful adventures from Stay More, Arkansas, an imaginary Ozark enclave where shrewd and sexy hill folk mingle with reclusive millionaires rich from Wal-Mart stock, indigenous Indians, and legendary leftovers from the town's occasionally magical and completely mythical past. Now, with Thirteen Albatrosses, Harington returns to Stay More to document the uproarious attempt of native son Vernon Ingledew to earn the governorship of his great, if sometimes much-maligned, state. But, to his own shock, Ingledew--a handsome but less than telegenic ham magnate and self-educated polymath--is hampered by what his opponents refer to as his "Thirteen Albatrosses." Among them: he is an atheist; he never attended college; he lives in sin with his first cousin, Jelena; he displays a hysterically cryptic vocabulary. Not to mention the fact that he also supports "extirpating"--that is, getting rid of--hospitals, schools, prisons, tobacco, and handguns.

Nevertheless, his candidacy quickly attracts the heaviest political hitters. This battle-tested band, known as Ingledew's Seven Samurai, are challenged not only by Vernon's extensive and dazzling liabilities, but also by kidnappings, the advent of adulterous liaisons within their own camp, and the unrelenting evil-doing of detested adversary Governor Shoat Bradfield, a model of corruption who purchased his high school equivalency certificate from a later-jailed school official.

Although he was born and raised in Little Rock, Donald Harington spent nearly all of his early summers in the Ozark mountain hamlet of Drakes Creek, his mother's hometown, where his grandparents operated the general store and post office. There, before he lost his hearing to meningitis at the age of twelve, he listened carefully to the vanishing Ozark folk language and the old tales told by storytellers. His academic career is in art and art history and he has taught art history at a variety of colleges, including his alma mater, the University of Arkansas. His first novel was published by Random House in 1965, and since then he has published twelve other novels, most of them set in the Ozark hamlet of his own creation, Stay More, based loosely upon Drakes Creek. He has also written books about artists. He won the Robert Penn Warren Award in 2003, the Porter Prize in 1987, the Heasley Prize at Lyon College in 1998, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 1999, and that same year won the Arkansas Fiction Award of the Arkansas Library Association. He has been called "an undiscovered continent" (Fred Chappell) and "America's Greatest Unknown Novelist" (Entertainment Weekly).